This year WebEnglish.se recommends you start your term with One Word New Year Resolutions. The social media is teeming with examples from teachers and Whole Wheat Class gives out free One Little Word New Years Posters in TpT. There are many more New Year Activities in the Calendar, both on the 1st and the 7th of January.
One of my favourite speaking activities in the first lesson is ‘Find Someone Who’. After the students have walked about asking their friends and written a different name on most of the lines, I ask them: “Who found someone who…?” and the person who has done the actual activity can tell something about it (with me asking follow-up questions). This can take half the lesson.
A twist to ‘Find someone who’ is to give each student a strange activity that you know for sure nobody did. Then they can come up with the whole imaginative story and tell the others first in groups and then some for the whole class.
Either on the first or second lesson, it’s time to get some inspiration. The latest addition here is The secrets of learning a new language, which you can stop after about 5 min.
WebEnglish.se recommends leaving the planning for the new term to the second lesson and let the first lesson be all about relationships and a welcoming atmosphere. Remember to have fun!